


Denouement

by BonesOfBirdWings



Series: the rest is silence [2]
Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: (only a little though), Angst, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Gen, Ghosts, hinted Rosencrantz/Guildenstern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 02:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21486937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BonesOfBirdWings/pseuds/BonesOfBirdWings
Summary: "Autumnal - nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke." - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadHoratio sees a ghost.
Relationships: Guildenstern & Rosencrantz, Horatio & Rosencrantz & Guildenstern
Series: the rest is silence [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1548745
Comments: 2
Kudos: 74





	Denouement

**Author's Note:**

> You don't need to read Exeunt to read this, but all events in Exeunt are canon to this story.

Horatio wakes in a cold sweat. A half-forgotten dream haunts him. Death and mourning, the ache of weeping in his lungs. He rubs his hands together, and can almost feel the slick slide of blood.

The moon illuminates the room with pale light and ghastly shadows. He doesn’t recognize these chambers or the bed or the hands, all of them too clean and unspoiled. 

He stands on unsteady legs. The floor freezes his feet to numbness in seconds, and the chill from the window lashes his bones. He peers out of the small window cut into the thick stone of the walls. A dead man stares back.

With a muttered curse, Horatio throws himself backwards, barely catching himself on the bed before he can crash to the floor. “What art thou,” he says, the words tripping quickly off his tongue. More want to follow, a winding trail of words that burn in his throat like fire, but he swallows them back.

The dead man tilts its head, but says nothing.

“I charge thee, speak!” Horatio demands.

There is an emptiness where eyes used to be. The man says nothing.

“I charge thee,” Horatio repeats, terror fracturing his voice, “speak!”

The man says nothing. It only stares at Horatio with the endless things that are not eyes.

“Speak,” Horatio pleads. “For the love of God, speak.”

The man opens its mouth (a terrible, gaping maw, an infinity of nothingness), and screams.  
  


* * *

  
The dead man is not Hamlet's father, but Horatio tells him that it is anyway.

He had to, the words yanked out of him by some force deeper than he can understand. He feels like nothing more than a marionette, jerked around by a cruel, uncaring player.

He retreats from the main thoroughfares of the castle. He needs to think, to center himself.

“Who are you?”

Horatio turns at the question, only to find himself face-to-face with a pair of nondescript men sitting on a nearby bench. “Horatio,” he answers. “And who are you?”

“Guilden-” The shorter man begins to answer, and then cuts himself off with a frown. “Rosen- Hmm, no, I think I was right the first time. Guilden-... No….”

“How can we expect consistency from others,” cries the taller, “when we cannot even produce it ourselves?”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” the shorter finally proclaims. “In no particular order.”

Horatio blinks. “What should I call you then?”

“Guildenstern and Rosencrantz,” the taller demands. “In that order.”

“Or any order at all,” the shorter man - Rosencrantz - says.

“Order is something in which we are sorely lacking, to be fair. Unless order is cyclical, and all this is a methodical system above our ability to comprehend.” Guildenstern gestures wildly, but doesn't move from his companion's side. They are pressed together from hip to toe, and Rosencrantz dodges Guildenstern's flying hands with a surprising economy of motion.

“It is fair?” Rosencrantz wants to know. “Us lacking in order, I mean.”

“A syllogism - one, life is not fair. Two, our life lacks order. Thus, a lack of order is not fair.”

“Cyclical?” Horatio asks despite himself.

Guildenstern looks at him, startled, like he forgot that Horatio was there. “Most things are,” he replies.

“Like what?” Rosencrantz asks.

“Circles, for one.”

“Is one a circle?”

“Physically or metaphysically?”

“Either, I suppose. Or both.”

Guildenstern taps his chin thoughtfully. “We die and then we are born; we are born and then we die. At our broadest, I suppose one is a circle, more or less.”

“How do we come back around?” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both turn to look at Horatio, and he figures he should explain. “I mean, between death and birth, what are we?”

Rosencrantz shrugs. “Dead, I suppose. I can't remember it, though.” He smiles at Guildenstern. “I suppose I've forgotten.”

Guildenstern grips Rosencrantz's hand hard, and stares blankly at his throat. Horatio makes his escape.  
  


* * *

  
Hamlet wants to talk to the dead man.

Horatio protests, but there’s a fire in Hamlet’s eyes, a dark, consuming thing. He doesn't hear Horatio, or he doesn't listen to him. It comes out to the same thing in the end.

The dead man appears on the wall at midnight, and beckons to Hamlet. Hamlet makes to obey, to approach it, but Horatio snags his hand to hold him back. Hamlet's hand is ice-cold. On his lips, Horatio can see the chill of death, cessation of the blood in his veins. He blinks, and he can see the spill of blood against Hamlet's fine garments.

He lets him go.

The dead man never opens its mouth, only stares at Hamlet with its eyeless gaze, but Hamlet talks to it like it’s speaking, like it's conversing with him.

The dead thing reaches out a hand (is it a hand?) and grips Hamlet's chin. The fingers sink into his flesh. Horatio muffles a scream against his teeth.

Hamlet forces them all to swear never to tell what they saw tonight, while the dead thing manipulates his jaw like a puppeteer. Horatio can see the reflection of fingernails in Hamlet's pupils, wiggling back and forth, digging deeper and deeper.  
  


* * *

  
“The dead man isn't his father,” Horatio tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He didn't specifically seek the two of them out again, but he'd stumbled over them on the way to the gardens. Literally stumbled over them, since they're sprawled out in the middle of the path.

“Who's his father, then?” asks Rosencrantz.

“Well, his father is dead,” clarifies Horatio. “But the dead man isn't him.”

“Who is it then?”

“The dead man? I have no idea.”

“No,” sighs Rosencrantz, like Horatio is being unreasonable. “The father.”

“King Hamlet,” Horatio replies. He feels like they're having two very different conversations.

“I thought he was a prince?”

“Yes,” Guildenstern answers, “which means his father was a king.”

“And dead,” Rosencrantz adds.

“And dead,” Guildenstern agrees.

“Are most kings dead?” Rosencrantz asks.

“In our experience, fifty-fifty.”

“The point is,” Horatio interrupts, “that the dead man isn't him.”

“How do you know?” Rosencranz asks earnestly.

“He doesn't look like the King Hamlet I knew, for one.”

“King Hamlet wasn't dead when you knew him,” Guildenstern points out. “Death changes people, I would assume.”

“In what ways?” Horatio replies. 

“Well, they’re not alive anymore,” Rosencrantz offers. “That’s the major change, I would say.”

“Is that a major change?” something prompts Horatio to ask. He gets the sense that it isn’t quite the right question.

“I think it must be,” Rosencrantz replies. Horatio knows it isn’t quite the right answer.

“Quite a large change,” Guildenstern agrees. “Perhaps the most important quality of a person’s life, the fact that he has one.”

Horatio ponders that for a long while. He thinks of Hamlet, and of dead kings, and of ghosts in the moonlight.

“But if we are a circle,” Horatio eventually offers, “from life to death and back again - where do we draw the line? Are we not always somewhere in-between?”

“I don’t think I’m dead,” Guildenstern says. A stillness blankets them, like a layer of autumn leaves. “I think that I would know if I were.”

“Even a little bit?” Horatio wants to know. “The cycle turns, and we come ever closer. You don’t feel the touch of it? The chill of it?”

Rosencrantz turns wide, desperate eyes to him, and Horatio knows that Rosencrantz does. Perhaps the same way that Horatio feels it, or is starting to. He wonders if Rosencrantz understands what’s happening. Horatio certainly doesn’t. 

A deep silence falls. Horatio eventually takes a seat across from the pair. The sky darkens, from blue to orange, and then to red, and, finally, to black.  
  


* * *

  
Hamlet orders Horatio to watch his uncle during the play, and what can Horatio do but obey? His dearest friend is haunted, both by a dead man and by something stranger, deeper. A reasonable man would escape, would have left this all far behind, but, well - Horatio has never been reasonable when it comes to Hamlet.

“Like what you see?” a voice asks from behind Horatio.

He jumps and turns to see the head of the player troupe. “You’re not…” Horatio gestures to the stage, where the actors are miming an overwrought death scene, “participating?”

The Player waves a negligent hand. “Anything’s… participation… as long as you’re generous with your definition of a stage.”

They are both silent for a long moment. Horatio watches the play.

“You know about King Hamlet,” he states. It’s not a question.

“Everyone knows about King Hamlet,” the Player replies. It’s not an answer.

“Have you seen the ghost?”

The Player laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “No, no, I haven’t. I daresay that no one but you has.”

Horatio’s brow furrows. “But Marcellius, and Hamlet, they both saw -”

“What did they see?” the Player interrupts.

“The dead man.”

“Did they?” the Player retorts. “Did they truly see it?”

Horatio knows that they did not. They couldn’t have. Or perhaps they did, and Horatio is the one who is seeing something that isn’t there.

But he knows that this isn’t the case. He says nothing.

The Player nods, satisfied. “Of course they didn’t,” he continues, his voice heavy with finality. “They are players in this tragedy.”

“Then what am I?” Horatio asks desperately. “What am I? What is my role in all of this? What is the purpose of my… participation?”

The Player turns to him, surprised. “I thought that would have been obvious. You’re the audience.”  
  


* * *

  
Horatio sees death everywhere.

There’s poison and drowning, swords and goblets, betrayal and heartbreak. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in England now, and Horatio knows that they’re dead too. They’d said goodbye before leaving on the ship, and there had been something deep and desolate in Rosencrantz’s gaze (or maybe Guildenstern’s, or maybe both).

Hamlet is in Horatio’s arms, shuddering in the grip of the poison. He is looking at Horatio, but he has no eyes. 

“The rest is silence,” Hamlet tells Horatio with the void that is almost a mouth. Horatio gently releases the thing that was once Hamlet, or was never Hamlet (but was certainly always dead).

“Good night, sweet prince,” Horatio tells the dead man, the ghost. “And a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

He breathes in, and can taste death and mourning, the ache of weeping in his lungs. He rubs his hands together, and can feel the slick slide of blood.

He knows there are no angels, no night, no rest. There is only this, the endless drag of the inevitable.

He tries not to close his eyes, tries not to blink. He knows where he’ll…  
  


* * *

  
He wakes.

His hands are clean. The sheets are pristine. The wind is cold and it howls through his bones.

There’s a dead man outside his window, waiting in the moonlight.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! Sorry to my subscribers who probably came for my actually popular fanfic, but ehhh you probably know by now what you've gotten yourself into.
> 
> Thanks to astahfrith for beta'ing this and screaming about it with me!! (even tho you had never even read r&g are dead... thank you for your hard work <3)
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this strange little piece!! (plz talk about r&g are dead or other hamlet-derived works with me, i will never be over this play)


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